Irving Babbitt on the individual and political imagination
Abstract
This thesis explores how Irving Babbitt, an interdisciplinary thinker of the first decades of the twentieth century, discovered critical theory as an alternative to universal explanations in philosophy, personal living, and politics. A qualitative study, this work is a philosophical hermeneutic in which Babbitt's critical voice is compared to and distinguished from other voices of Babbitt that have previously been explored. Unlike other treatments of Babbitt that privilege his involvement with the New Humanists, a group of academics in the 1920's and early 1930's who sought to reorient university curricula away from specialization, this study considers his work apart from that context. The Babbitt considered in this study is the Babbitt who takes on the problem of the free imagination and its relevance to epistemology and ontology. Without claiming direct and concrete links between the self and Being, Babbitt theorizes the existence of a critical imagination which co-creates such links, what he calls "illusions." Illusions are aesthetic windows opened on understanding that can enable people to make sufficient standards for philosophy, personal living, and politics. Such standards are flexibly held approximations rather than exhaustive or authoritative. When his work is looked at from this approach, I argue that Babbitt's chief contribution to philosophy is his theorization of non-definitive solutions for living. Babbitt found that without the ability to make certain and specific epistemological and ontological claims, people would have to be satisfied with approximations. In this, I find that Babbitt was not deeply understood by his modernist colleagues. Babbitt can speak commandingly to contemporary audiences who are immersed in the daily problem of interpretation and action, but who have not considered Babbitt's unique treatment of this problem. Thus I add a conclusion comparing Babbitt to Jean Baudrillard, a prominant postmodern thinker.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Weinstein, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Philosophy|American studies|Political science
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.